Fortunately, animators have found the solution to this problem: completely disregard any sense of scale! Sure, the giant is half the size of the building... on the outside! On the inside, he's got a good 10 or so feet (3 m) of space between his head and the ceiling. This effect is particularly noticeable when size is compared to other characters; a regularly-sized human might stand about as tall as the giant's hip in a regular scenario, but the giant will easily catch that same character in the palm of one hand in a later action sequence.

The same lack of scale holds true for tiny characters as well. Unless size is specified, characters who are simply stated to be "small" tend to bounce between the size of a housecat and a rat, or for even smaller characters, a rat and a roach. Don't be surprised if a fairy who fits in a character's shirt pocket later turns out to be as big as a baseball in a later fight.

Note that this trope mostly applies to animation and special effects. It is rather... difficult... to modify the size of an actor in a live-action series. Though in some cases there might be a size discrepancy due to the visual requirements of keeping two actors of wildly different heights in the same frame. See Scully Box for that. Perspective can also be a tricky thing, without meaning to some angles might give an odd size comparison even if the math is right. This trope does not cover creatures or characters that can change size or shape at will, though their giant or tiny forms may fall victim to this trope on their own (and see Shapeshifter Baggage).

Examples:

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Large Characters

Anime & Manga

In Bleach, especially noticeable with Rukia's height relative to Ichigo (and sometimes Renji). And with Yachiru's height compared to Kenpachi. Officially she's about half his height, not counting his Anime Hair. Yet frequently Yachiru is drawn as only slightly larger than Kenpachi's head.

The greatest offenders in Digimon Frontier is Korikakumon and MetalKabuterimon, who tower over human spirits and most of the other beast sprits by more than double and are absolutely massive compared to the human characters themselves. Zephyrmon and the human spirits have occasionally been scaled up to Korikakumon's size as well.

An Oozaru's size seems to vary depending on what they're interacting with. When Goku is tearing apart the castle, he seems to be almost as big as the whole thing, but when interacting with his friends, he appears to be about as big as a chunk of the castle he had earlier picked up and threw. The anime adds a bunch of padding and changes the scene around so that he stays pretty consistently on the larger end of the size scale, but that still makes him seem smaller the second time he transforms. Z and GT are a bit better about this.

Also Chi Chi's father the Ox King. In his first appearance he was a giant easily twice the size of a full-grown adult. About midway through the series he seems to get a bit smaller, but still a giant. In Dragon Ball Z he seems to be just barely taller than Goku.

This could be said for most of the cast in DBZ. Goku, who is 5'9, is constantly shown as tall or taller than Yamcha and Tien, who are 6' and 6'1 respectively. Piccolo, despite being 7'6, has been shown to be only a head taller than Goku, but literally twice as tall as Krillin. Vegeta suffers from this the least, however. He is supposedly either as tall or shorter than Bulma (he's 5'5), but he is often shown to be only an inch shorter than Goku, while looking a full head taller than Krillin, who is exactly 5'.

Vegeta also grows noticeably taller over the course of the series. In the Saiyan Saga, he's drawn in a way that emphasizes his Big Guy, Little Guy dynamic with Nappa. Once Nappa's dead, he's drawn closer in height to the main characters.

Another odd example is Chiaotzu. He is supposedly 4'6.5", but usually doesn't even come halfway up the taller Z fighters, being even smaller than Gohan was as a child. Super seems to put him at the same size as Marron, Krillin and 18's five year old daughter, while other shots make him appear almost doll-sized compared to Tien.

King Cold seems to range from 15' to 30' tall. Also, when he acquires Trunks' sword, it becomes big enough for him to wield properly.

Hercule/Mr. Satan randomly looks 10' tall in some scenes of the manga.

Whenever Gohan and Krillin appear in the same panel, Krillin is usually drawn so he is a bit taller than Gohan. This means that he sometimes is barely taller than a 4-year-old during the Saiyan Saga, and sometimes looks taller than he should be in the Cell Saga when Gohan has grown a lot. In other panels, his height seems more consistent.

Fist of the North Star to ridiculous extremes. Rao's horse (Kokuō-gō) ranges from being a noticeably tall normal horse, to casually bury a man with a single stomp (with an estimated height of one hundred feet or 30 m). Humans are not an exception, as ones in the background often look freaking enormous, even compared to a big guy like Kenshiro, which elevates many from "Giant Mook" to "size of a goddamn garage". For example Zeed once stood behind a man he was about to kill and looked like he was over a story tall.

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure gives us Koichi Hirose from Diamond is Unbreakable (Part 4). He is officially 157cm/5'1". However, he's always drawn much shorter than that, as though he is 3'0". When Tamami Kobayashi is introduced, he is clearly a tall and muscular man, even though he's suppose to be 153cm/5'0". He's officially shorter than Koichi, but comparing their heights in the manga clearly contradicts this. Strangely enough, Tamami is later drawn nearly as short as Koichi. There is no explanation for this in the story. The same thing happened to Toshikazu Hazamada, who is 165cm/5'4". First, he appears much taller◊ than his official height, then shrinks◊ later on, going straight into You Don't Look Like You territory. A fan theory is that, since the part is told from Koichi's point of view, everyone appears the way he sees them: he thinks of himself as weak and frail, so he sees himself as tiny; originally he's scared of Tamami and Toshikazu, so they look larger, but once they're defeated and "on the same level" as he is, he sees them the same way he does himself.

Mazinger Z: The applied scale was not consistent at all, and it could vary from one chapter to another or even in different scenes of the same chapter. Sometimes the Humongous Mecha were too big or too tiny, and the human beings and other objects too tiny. In episode 10, a Mechanical Beast grabbed skyscrapers with one of his hands and moved them to elsewhere. Initially his hands seemed as big as the buildings they were carrying, but later on he was just as tall as Mazinger-Z (18 meters), so his hands were way tinier than they should have been.

Tohru's dragon form in Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid ranges in size from "a small house" to "a single claw is bigger than a car". Justified by the fact that shapeshifting has been established as one of her powers from the very beginning.

Some of the bigger summons in can be subject to this. Databooks claim Gamabunta to be 100m tall (328 feet), and in mostappearances a person is about the size of one of his warts, but he looks even bigger in his first appearance. A more noticeable example is Gamaken who's first appearance shows him as about the size of a small house, but on his second he's as big as Gamabunta. The anime handwaves this with Gamakichi demonstrating a size-altering jutsu that allowed him (and presumably other large summons) to shrink to a more convenient size if needed.

The Tailed Beasts also appear to vary in size. The most notable example is the Nine-Tailed Fox; his first appearance portrays him as towering around 300m over the forests on the outskirts of the Leaf Village (implying that the trees are only 50m tall), a human being only the size of his pupil. Throughout the series, he is portrayed as being about a third that size — mainly because only half of his chakra is sealed inside Naruto. However, in the latest fight between Naruto/Kurama and five of the Tailed Beasts, the fox aura is just as big, if not a little smaller, than the other beasts.

The EVA Units in Neon Genesis Evangelion are somewhere between 40 and 200 meters tall. One piece of concept art says Unit 01 is a more realistic ten, but the creators were honest enough to admit never worrying about anything aside from what would make an interesting visual, and as a result the Evas' size relative to buildings, known landmarks, people, etc., changed from episode to episode.

Rebuild of Evangelion seems to more consistently stick with 80m. Conversely, Super Robot Wars (where a mech's size determines its probability of getting hit and in some games damage taken) each unit is only 15 meters for gameplay purposes.

Often surprisingly good about this, despite having characters who vary in size between about 3' (7.5 cm) tall to 8'8" (264 cm), and that's just the main cast. Secondary characters and especially villains can get enormous. The group of pirates known as the Seven Warlords of the Sea (see Moria below) have an average height of around 15 feet (4.5 m), but change slightly to suit whoever they're talking to.

Sometimes, though, particularly on the interior of a ship, the taller characters like Brooke will shrink ever so slightly to keep it from looking too silly that they're all able to fit under the same roof.

In Gecko Moria's initial appearance, his foot was twice as big as a normal-sized man was tall. By the time he actually got involved in the action, he had shrunk to a more manageable 18 feet (5.5 m) or so. Though the characters that were up to his foot were themselves later shown to only be about a third of the height of an "average" One Piece character, so Moria's height is actually fairly consistent.

San Juan Wolf, the biggest character in the series, and a giant larger than any other giant portrayed so far is about the most absurd example yet. He makes the second largest character (who himself makes giants look small) seem unnoticeable by comparison, by appearing behind an island that character was on. So huge he's bigger than the building he was until recently imprisoned in, which also houses every other great criminal and was large enough that dozens of people could go missing. Uhh... Lampshaded by having him break the raft that his crew (averaging about 15 feet or 4.5 m without him) used up until this point, necessitating the need of a battleship. Both of which should be about the size of his hand.

There's also the fact that Wolf was imprisoned in Impel Down, despite seemingly being larger than the prison. And he's been seen in the ocean with no ill effects, so it can't be a Devil Fruit that lets him alter his size (which would negate the need for a larger ship anyway).

Charlotte Linlin, "Big Mom" is absolutely massive, as her epithet implies, but this varies drastically depending on the scene. She seems to be about Moriah's height on average, (roughly 18 to 22 feet). But other instances, such as her frequent hunger rampages, often amp up her height to towering over many of the buildings in her cities.

This is surprisingly frequent in the anime. A crowning case would have to be with Dunsparce though. Dunsparce are normally 4'11" (1.5m) in height, approximately the height of Ash. In "Following a Maiden's Voyage!" though, they appear to be shorter than a Pidgey... which is 1'00 (30cm). It should be noted that Pokemon longer than they are tall usually have their length given as their "height". Given its other proportions, though, a Dunsparce would still probably be considerably larger than a Pidgey.

In the anime, Charizard's size would change all the time. It's usually about 1.5 times Ash's height (even then that's larger than the 5'7" or 170cm given in the game), but sometimes seems to be about the size of a car.

A good example of this is it's battle with Articuno. When it is using Seismic Toss, Articuno is larger, but when they are standing next to the trainers after the battle is over, Charizard is larger.

This is further brought into notice when we encounter an entire alley of wild Charizard. Most of them, even the smallest, are nearly double the size of Ash's at minimum.

Ash's Staraptor; sometimes it comes up to Ash's shoulder rather than about Brock's height.

Ash's Gliscor; usually it's about Ash's size, but sometimes it's only half that. In "Familiarity Breeds Strategy!", it was much larger than him. Possibly justified in that it had spent time away from Ash in training before it returned, and it was implied that this Gliscor was young when it evolved.

The Raticate are sometimes smaller than their pre-evo and Fearow are also ridiculously tiny; they're normally a Giant Flyer species.

This isn't limited to Pokemon as occasionally the human character's heights are inconsistent. Misty is sometimes portrayed as a little taller then Ash while sometimes they're the same height. May started off of similar size as the former in her first appearance, but then was usually drawn slightly shorter than Ash.

From the Ranma ˝ manga, Pantyhose Tarō's cursed minotaur-like form. It can vary between about just twice as tall as a man, to being able to fit an human being comfortably into his palm. The addition of Combat Tentacles doesn't help; their length and thickness are quite variable too.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi, from the second season of Sengoku Basara, is a great example of this. The man can't seem to stay the same size for ten minutes! He can go from just a head taller than the main character in one scene, and in the next, he can be almost on par with Honda Tadakatsu. His final episode fight with Masamune features this trope in spades.

In Super Dimension Fortress Macross, not only the Zentradi, but the Humongous Mecha they pilot, have severe scale issues. A Valkyrie ought to be able to fit into the pilot's compartment of a Glaug or Regult. This is because the Zentradi themselves are at roughly the same height as a Valkyrie (the Battroid mode being explicitly created so that humans could fight on an equal footing with Zentradi soldiers). However, when a Valkyrie and a Regult or Glaug are shown on screen at the same time, they are shown as around the same size — the Zentradi mecha should tower over the Valkyrie, being at the very minimum half again as high.

Later series got better about this. In Macross Frontier, macronized Klan Klan, when her Quedluun-Rau was out of commission, donned a FAST pack and the applique armor of a VF-25 over her spacesuit as if it was Powered Armor.

The whole series has mild elements of this throughout. The most obvious examples occur during the final battle. The two machines fight on top of, around, and with entire galaxies around them. Later, each previous version of Gurren Lagann emerges from the mouth of the next version. Even considering how big they get, this doesn't seem possible. Luckily, there are mitigating factors. 1: Rule of Cool and 2: It's Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann!!

It had actually been pretty good up until that point; as Lagann, Gurren Lagann, and Arc Gurren Lagann are each about ten times bigger than the stage below them (5, 50, and 500 feet respectively — 1.5, 15 and 150 m), while a comparitive diagram shows Arc Gurren Lagann being utterly dwarfed by the moon-sized Cathedral Terra hundreds, if not thousands, of times over. When the two do interact, the Arc Gurren easily fits inside the ship's power core. But by the final battle, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and its equally large foe are alternately big enough to throw galaxies, just about able to fit the Earth in their palms, and able to make the Anti-Spiral homeworld in the Granzanboa's head-dress look about the size of an egg compared to a human. In short, they could be anywhere between the distance between Earth and the moon and the size of two and half galaxies; a factor of millions if not billions of multiples. Considering the final battle takes place not in normal space but in a Pocket Dimensionwhere thought can shape reality and normal laws of physics might not apply at all, it's hardly inconceivable for the mechs and their surroundings to not adhere to normal notions of scale.

Ira Gamagoori from Kill la Killhas only one set size, and that's "bigger than you". In any scene he appears, he's drawn as larger than any other character to varying extents (with just one exception: where the Big Bad towered over him in a display of power). Episode 15 has what's probably the most extreme fluctuation: when the Elite Four are standing in a line shoulder-to-shoulder he seems to be less than twice Nonon's height, whereas just minutes earlier his head alone was larger than her entire body.

The various mecha in Science Ninja Team Gatchaman vary in size from scene to scene. In one episode (set in an expy of India), Ken and Jinpei are standing at the base of a peacock statue that looks reasonably-sized. Then the mecha reveals itself, and is large enough to contain an army of goons and heavy machinery such as a crane with a wrecking ball. Other episodes have similar scale variations.

Though she's hardly giant, Teddy in Eiken. In the back of the first volume of the manga the author admits that he draws her without much aforethought so both in and out of costume her size can vary greatly from panel to panel.

A mild version of this occurs in Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire. Buck is taller than the average human, but how tall exactly seems to vary a bit, from being about a head taller to what seems like a few feet. There's also one panel with Buck and Hyraxx where Hyraxx seems to be about half of Buck's height, while in all other panels she reaches to his chest. However this is probably because of the angle of the shot (the view in the panel is upward from near floor-level, which messes the perspective somewhat) rather than the relative sizes of the characters changing.

The Transformers comic features huge problems with this, with gigantic characters like Omega Supreme and Metroplex (each well over 100 feet or 30 m tall) would be giants in one scene, and be barely taller than a good-sized Autobot in the next. The cartoon series has this problem, too. Fan consensus about the size inconsistences is "Just ignore it", as they're aware of the massive Fan Wank it would entail to explain it. At the beginning of IDW's run, for example, Metroplex was shown to be large enough that he could stomp a single Decepticon flat under his foot (so a couple hundred feet tall) but by the time that Transformers: Dark Cybertron happened he'd grown so large that the entire Rodpod (which could easily accommodate half a dozen Autobots with room to spare) could fly into his eye socket without scraping the sides, making Metroplex easily several miles tall (Word of God is that he's 15 kilometers tall in robot mode). Similarly, the various Combiners like Devastator and Monstructor were originally depicted as being as large as their individual component robots stacked on top of each other, while by the time that Prowl was made Devastator's head he was depicted as growing to several times his normal size in the process.

The comic is a little better about it: size changing is an explicit power that Transformers have, so it's not super insane when Megatron changes into a gun in one shot and is then much smaller when wielded in the next. In fact, tremendous use is made of out of otherwise laughable transformations because of the ability to become the actual size of whatever it is you turn into; an actual-size handgun, radio, or insect is a very good disguise for a house-sized robot to have.

Abused in the British Valiant comic's Danny Doom — a swamp monster seen towering over village buildings is unsatisfyingly revealed to be a bog-standard man in a suit.

The Sentinels from X-Men. They can be taller than a house or just twice as large as a normal human. Of course, there are dozens upon dozens of different-model Sentinels in the 'verse, so it only really becomes egregious when it's the same Sentinel.

General Grievous In Star Wars: Kanan. His size varies throughout the series, being just really tall to a freakin 12 foot giant!

Everyone agrees that Iron Man foe Boris "The Titanium Man" Bullski is a very large man, but just how big varies issue to issue and sometimes panel to panel. "Last Tango With The Titanium Man" has an especially egregious example, in which Boris is simultaneously larger than a city bus, yet able to fit into an armchair in his hideout.

Films — Animation

The title Giant in The Iron Giant seemed to have varying sizes in different scenes. There was an interview where Brad Bird said they tried to keep the size consistent throughout, but admits that they deliberately made the Giant much taller in one early scene (the shot where where Hogarth is in the car and looks back to see the Giant silhouetted against the night sky).

Rankin/Bass had an issue with this between The Year Without a Santa Claus and the sequel, A Miser Brothers' Christmas. The Miser Brothers are a lot smaller in the sequel than the original.

In Alice in Wonderland, Alice's size shifts around a little when she grows inside the White Rabbit's house. In some shots her face is visible through the window in front, in others only the top part of her face can be seen, and when she watches Bill climb up to the roof her eye takes up the entire window.

Wreck-It Ralph: This happens quite a bit when characters from one video game appear in another game, or in Game Central Station, particularly for the title character. Ralph is stated as being nine feet tall, and appears as a giant, especially compared to the Nicelanders (who appear 3 or 4 feet tall because of the game's graphic limitations) or Felix, the game's hero, who is between 5 and 6 feet. Yet, when Ralph shows up in Hero's Duty, a High-Definition First-Person Shooter, he's the same height as the other soldiers, including Calhoun. When Calhoun and Felix end up following Ralph into another game, Calhoun appears 6 or 7 feet tall, but Felix is depicted as a little more than half her height.

Hungarian animated movie Cat City does this infamously and both way. It depicts a conflict between mice (small) and cats (big) with the occasionally other Fully Dressed Cartoon Animal thrown in like bats (small) and rats (somewhere in between) with no comparative size chart at all. Most jarring example is probably, when the mouse hero fits comfortably into a bottle that one of the rats drank empty in an earlier scene (where he was riding in cat's helicopter and was only a head shorter), and later stands face to face with him, coming up to the rat's shoulder.

Films — Live-Action

Godzilla's height has varied so much it's pretty hard to tell how big he's supposed to be. Movies often cite an exact height for the monster. Originally he was supposed to be 50 meters tall. The Godzilla of The Return of Godzilla was 80 meters tall, and he grew to 100 in Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah. This is all well and good, but the special effects were often... inconsistent in this way.

In Godzilla vs. Gigan, King Ghidorah looked like a fraction of the size of the Godzilla Tower in one scene, even though the tower was specifically said to be 50 meters tall and Ghidorah is 100 meters tall. Later, the 50 meter tall Godzilla stands next to the tower and is the same size as it.

In Terror of Mechagodzilla, in one brief shot, Mechagodzilla and Titanosaurus randomly look like they are the size of mountains, nearly filling up the sky, instead of about 50 and 60 meters tall respectively.

The generally excellent (in terms of both SFX and story) Godzilla vs. Biollante features a particularly grievous blunder in scale in a scene featuring a psychic girl standing on an oil platform facing down Godzilla. Godzilla was supposed to be 80 meters tall. He looked maybe 20.

It should be pointed out that each era of the Godzilla films takes place in a different universe (this is especially evident in the Millennium series, in which, apart from two exceptions, each film takes place in a separate continuity), thus it's reasonable the monsters aren't completely identical.

This was kind of spurred on by real world changes. A 50 meter monster is huge in mid-twentieth century Tokyo (geographically busy locations tend to have strict building codes), but would look a bit silly in the modern city. Incidentally, the original Godzilla is a painstakingly accurate snapshot of a city that no longer exists. All the buildings Godzilla destroys were real buildings, down to the little shopping centers.

A major point of criticism for The Godzilla Power Hour was that Godzilla's size varied greatly within scenes, such that Godzilla could carry the entire ship with two hands while a human character can just barely fit in his palm in a later shot.

Godzilla 2000, in its Chroma Key scenes, manages to occasionally do this to Godzilla in the same shot. This is caused by having the screen portions with the human characters zoom in/out or move at different rates from the screen portions with Godzilla.

In the Roland Emmerich / Dean Devlin 1998 Godzilla, as Roger Ebert and other critics noted, Zilla constantly changes size within the film as well.

In Godzilla Final Wars, either Godzilla shrank or Zilla grew, in their short scene together Zilla stands nearly as tall as Godzilla despite his horizontal build.

Ditto King Kong, who was able to straddle the World Trade Center and loom over the skyline of New York in the posters for the 1976 and 1933 movies, but was somewhere around 20 feet tall in the film, tops.

In the original, he also gets bigger when he arrives in New York. So it's not so much "everything is bigger in America" as "America makes everything bigger"?

A tip of the hat to Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, whose main character never appears to be 50 feet tall. Most of the time she appears to be only two stories high, while in other times she stands almost as tall as an electric pylon, making her about 75 feet at least. As for the famous poster, there she seems to be between 150 and 200 feet.

The Oliphaunts appear to half or double in size every time the camera moves.

Gimli and the halflings seem to change height in some scenes.note Due to the height differences between the characters and the actors playing them, Gimli and the hobbits were the right heights to appear on-screen together and seem "correct," but if anyone else was in the frame, they had to cheat the angles.

Avoiding this was a major concern of the Transformers Film Series, not only regarding the established height of these giant robots but regarding how they transform from their alternate mode into those giant robots. They had to fit inside their vehicle. Realistically Optimus Prime's original cab-over design would have resulted in a relatively small robot mode, and so they made him a full tractor rig in order to give him enough mass. Same thing with Bumblebee's change from a VW Beetle into a Camaro. They also had to play with Starscream's transformation scheme so that he didn't completely tower over every other robot, if it was similar to G1 Starscream he should have been upwards of 60 feet (18 m) tall. Still, there were some intentional shifts in scale, mostly in regards to being a visual cheat: Optimus was able to hold Sam and Mikaela in one hand and later pinched a pair of glasses between his fingers — the glasses would be over a foot (30 cm) long in comparison.

EveryStar Trek series is guilty of this, as are most if not all of the films. Ex Astris Scientia has frighteningly exhaustive articles about some of the most variably-sized spacecrafts in the franchise.

The 2009 Star Trek film upscaled the Enterprise from the original series design to nearly twice as long. This was largely because they wanted to keep an extremely oversized shuttlebay (the original carried 2 while the new version had at least 10). The Abrams Enterprise was designed to be only moderately bigger than the original (280 meters to 360 tip of the saucer section to end of the nacelle) but the official statement for the movie is now is 700 meters, about the same size as the Sovereign class Enterpise-E. This has resulted in conflicting size comparisons between shots.

In Star Trek V: The Final Frontier for a scene involving the characters climbing a vertical shaft they wanted it to seem like a genuinely MASSIVE tunnel. Official schematics list a Constitution class ships like the Enterprise as having around 24-25 decks (some areas in engineering aren't officially classified as Decks), but "Deck 79" appeared and fans were appropriately curious.

In Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, the Klingon Bird of Prey is initially seen looming over a small spaceship, and then shown to be considerably smaller than the Enterprise. Extrapolating from the two scenes would appear to indicate that the aforementioned small spaceship is about the size of a typical single-family house, which is not consistent with the scenes set on board it.

That same Bird of Prey gets in on the action in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. A scene of it looming over the whaling ship has it being bigger than the Enterprise. A few minutes later, the main characters climb out of a hatch, and it looks barely bigger than that same whaling ship.

Klingon Birds of Prey varied widely in size from tiny things with a crew of a dozen to capital ships the size of the Enterprise D. This was eventually retconned as being several different classes with the same external design and nickname. Though of course this doesn't do anything to explain the Bird of Prey size discrepancies in Star Trek III and IV since those are all the same ship.

The evil giantess from Dude, Where's My Car?. For the most part she seems to be around 20-25 feet tall, however there are a few inconsistencies. First, she seems to get smaller when she's crawling out of the arcade. Then she gets bigger when she exits. When she devours Tommy she swallows him whole despite the fact that at 25 ft tall she would've needed to bite him in half first.

Elliot's size in Pete's Dragon (1977) frequently keeps changing. In some scenes, he's a big as a house, in others, he's just a bit larger than the humans.

The CGI Jabba the Hutt seen in the special edition of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope appears much smaller than the puppet used for the same character in Return of the Jedi. The reason for this is that the scene was originally shot in 1977 with an actor standing in for Jabba, but the scene was removed due to time and budget restraints. When Jabba finally showed up in Jedi, he was made much bigger than he would have been in the earlier deleted scene, so when that scene was re-instated, the Jedi Jabba design had to be downsized to fit into the set and choreography correctly. The Expanded Universe gives this a Hand Wave: Hutts grow in size as they gain influence.

Fan Works

Christian Humber Reloaded: Season-Bringer, the dragon who's described as being roughly the length of a small country and weighs about as much as a continent. Until he somehow manages to be the copilot in a small spacecraft that's only big enough to seat two people...

In Power Rangers Dino Thunder (adapted from Bakuryuu Sentai Abaranger), the main Humongous Mecha is the Thundersaurus Megazord, whose three component mecha (called Dino Zords) fit inside the gigantic Brachiozord. One of the Thundersaurus' attacks involves sliding down Brachio's tail... something that would be impossible if the Thundersaurus was the size it would have to be if it's formed from the Dino Zords (given the size the individual Dino Zords are when seen leaving Brachio.) In other words, when doing this attack, Thundersaurus apparently shrinks from being larger than Godzilla to being about two car-lengths. Also, additional Zords are also seen being released from Brachio, at a size that makes it impossible that they could all fit inside Brachio at once. There are even scenes in Abaranger that showed all the many Dino Zords inside Brachio's inner compartment... something that would require Brachio to be at least five times bigger than the size it's seen to be when alongside other Dino Zords.

In Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue, the Lightspeed Megazord is the main formation. When the Rail Rescues (giant train cars that carry the Lightspeed Megazord's component mecha) form the Super Train Megazord, and it's seen in relation to the Lightspeed, the Lightspeed looks like a ten-year-old standing next to Daddy. However, when both are in the same fight, the Monster of the Week is the same height as Lightspeed when in a shot with Lightspeed, and the same height as the Super Train when in a shot with the Super Train.

Power Rangers S.P.D. outdoes Brachio in terms of Bigger on the Inside-ness. The Delta Squad Megazord is the main formation, about the size of the other seasons' main formations (such as the Lightspeed and Thundersaurus Megazords.) Its components, the five Delta Runners, are released from the interior of the base, a building comparable in size to other downtown buildings, and we've seen enough of its interior to account for a great deal of its interior space. It's revealed that the base has its own Humongous Mecha formations, one humanoid, one vehicle. When releasing the Delta Runners while in its vehicle formation, we get to see where they're stored — and they take up the entirety of the base's interior. Even if all we've seen of the base's interior is all there is, making it so that people only occupy a few floors... there's just no way. And later, new jet-based Zords are introduced, and launched from the base in its standard building formation, and when it opens to release them, the base appears to be entirely hollow. Even if the jets are primarily stored in the underground hangar we find out about later on, there's no way the place they're launched from and the building's interior can coexist. Apparently, 90% of SPD's Earth headquarters exists in Hammerspace. The funniest thing is, that the SPD control room has a console that looks suspiciously like a TARDIS console.

Probably the series' greatest offender is Serpenterra. In Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, Serpentera is immense, making the Rangers' Megazords look like humans in comparison. In Power Rangers Wild Force, Serpenterra has noticeably shrunk, as Cole seems to be the same size the Red Dragon Thunderzord was.

A classic scene of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers has an overgrown Goldar reaching for an escaping bus. The bus is the size of a matchbox compared to Goldar's hand. The very next shot shows Goldar toying with the bus, now about same size as Goldar's own fore-arm.

The most widespread and egregious case of this, and is an issue combined with Show Accuracy/Toy Accuracy, is with humanoid Zords in general. Whether they're individual components or whole Megazords, humanoid Zords have a uniform general height shared with each other, such that a single humanoid Zoid is the same height as the whole Megazord it is a part of, even if it shouldn't be. This is a highlighted example of the mass shifting that Zords tend to do when combining together. The biggest case is when two Megazords, sometimes more, combine into a single one. This is especially true of much earlier Sentai starting Choujuu Sentai Liveman, when the practice was started, due to not having CGI and a uniform height on suits (before they got ridiculous like the RPM Ultrazord and the Samurai Gigazord) at the time. Depending on the nature of the combination, you could end up with two robots that are more or less the same height combining in a way that the components of one should add significant height to the other (Super Turbo Robo, Great Icarus, Gourai Senpuujin, and by proxy, Tenrai Senpuujin, and Bakuretsu and Gigant Kyoryuzin), and yet the end result is that the suit of the new combination isn't that much taller than either of its components, when comparing to the size of the monster it is fighting. One could say that MST3K Mantra ought to be applied here, since the only way to replicate individual humanoid Zords being smaller than its Megazord combination is if the suit actors were child-sized. This has mostly less prevalent in later series, with the advent for CGI, especially for multi-combinations, but it still happens for individual humanoid components and individual Megazords.

A running joke in MSt3K is that the Satellite of Love varies dramatically between scenes. Sometimes it's presented as being just the main room, the theater, and a hall between them, while others have a swimming pool, tennis court, and entire farm that Mike somehow managed to never notice.

Myths & Religion

In Norse Mythology giants vary between "a bit tall" to "literally the size of mountains". Not just a case of the race having wild height variation, either — the myths have the gods interacting normally with giants that were previously described as towering over them.

Pinballs

Shaquille O'Neal in Shaq Attaq is either 5 times larger than the other players or 30 times larger, depending on whether you go by the playfield art or the backglass.

Large creatures in Dungeons & Dragons are often drawn as positively titanic in artwork, when their actual listed sizes are designed to fit on a dungeon grid. Demogorgon in particular is usually claimed to be around twenty feet tall; a lot of art of the guy draws him as around twice that. The tarrasque is also routinely drawn destroying entire castles or towering over city skylines like a medieval Godzilla, a far cry from its usual given size of fifty feet tall.

The Space Marines of Warhammer 40,000 are famously victims of this. Depending on the Artist, they can be just about seven feet tall, or in the vicinity of ten feet tall. And that's not even getting into their pauldrons, which either look impressive or look impressive and block peripheral vision. Eventually an in-canon explanation was given to Hand Wave the size issues: The average Astartes is around seven and a half feet tall, with some Astartes having reactions to the augmentations that make them far larger than normal, with one example being Ultramarine Pasanius Lysane, whom is so large that they needed to incorporate Terminator Armour into his wargear, and another being Chapter Master Seydon of the Iron Snakes, whom actually stands over ten feet tall and needed custom Power Armor, as he's too large for a larger set of the difficult-to-make Terminator Armor. The introduction of Primaris Space Marines, who are bigger and stronger than their brothers, makes the scale even wonkier.

Toys

The relative scale of BIONICLE characters varies wildly from medium to medium.

A very early example is a Nesquik cereal TV ad (since promotional CDs were given away in cereal boxes back then), in which Toa Tahu appears among a group of human kids, and seems to be about as tall as a normal adult. According to official supplementary story material, he is actually about 7 and a half feet tall.

The infamous introduction scene from the movie The Legend Reborn has a supposedly 40 million feet tall Mata Nui robot looking considerably shorter when standing, not even reaching out of the planet's atmosphere. This robot and its smaller prototype also caused a lot of head-scratching for comic illustrators, since they had to appear small enough to fit into pictures with normal-sized characters.

Even when it came to the toys, scale issues still arose when comparing older figures to newer ones. The original toys have usually been short and stout, while later, more articulated figures used longer limbs and larger body pieces, and thus became taller themselves, even though they were supposed to be the same size as their ancestors. This was only ever addressed in the '08 storyline, in which it was explained that an energy source caused the Light Matoran to grow larger than normal. Just to let you know how things have changed since the line's debut in '01: the small Matoran have grown to be almost as big as the original Toa toys. In turn, the first Toa sets only reach up to the later Toa figures' waist.

The movie Web of Shadows tops all these examples. In it, the relative scale of the characters varies from scene to scene. According to the toys, the Visorak spiders are about as big as the Toa. The movie enlarged them quite a bit, but that's no big deal. However in one shot, a Visorak walks through a hall filled with Matoran-imprisoning spheres, and is no larger than those. Yet those spheres are small even compared to the Toa. Later Sidorak appears, and is the same size as the Visorak from earlier (his toy is at least two or three times its size, though). This would mean that Sidorak is the size of a puny Matoran, but that can't be, as he towers over the Toa, who in turn rise way above a regular Matoran's height. Then Keetongu appears. At first, his size compared to the Toa is about the same as the scale of their toys, as in, Keetongu's just slightly taller. But in a later scene, the immense Sidorak only comes up to his waist (thanks to some serious Forced Perspective)! Yet if we take the toys, Sidorak is supposed to be taller by about two heads. Finally, in the last scene, even the short Norik reaches up to Keetongu's waist, which would be impossible, given that Norik is same size as a Matoran! His figure doesn't even come up to Keetongu's knees, by the way.

The 2015 reboot has the Lord of Skull Spiders: several times the size of the heroes in the web animations, hardly reaches beyond their knees in toy-form.

Bowser's size tends to be consistent within individual games of the franchise, but varies greatly within the series. At the smallest, Bowser has been barely double Mario's height. At the largest (not counting the times Kamek and Kammy enhanced Bowser with spells), Bowser is almost kaiju-like. Bowser's size changes massively in Super Mario Sunshine. When he's sitting with Bowser Jr. in the ending, he's about the size you might assume an adult of his race would be compared to him. In the boss battle preceding it, however, he's enormous.

Bowser Jr. himself has changed sizes throughout games. In Super Mario Sunshine, he's smaller than Mario. In New Super Mario Bros., he's just slightly taller than Mario. In Super Mario Galaxy, he is as tall as, if not taller than, Peach. He shrinks back down to his Sunshine size for spinoffs, though. In New Super Mario Bros. Wii Bowser Jr. is the same height as Larry and Wendy, the middle-height Koopalings. He's overshadowed by Roy, Iggy and Morton (especially Morton, he's HUGE). Jr.'s pretty stocky, however, taking after Bowser, Morton and Roy in that regard.

"I thought it'd be nice to have her as a playable character, but the Toad characters had a similar physique to a Mario character than Peach does."

The size excuse apparently didn't hold water when Peach became a playable character in Super Mario 3D World; her size problem was addressed by shrinking her down a little bit so that she would have the same proportions as the Mario Bros. and the Toads, thus allowing everyone to have the same sized hit box.

They actually went and explained this in Bowser's Inside Story. Bowser's adrenaline makes him randomly grow to kaiju sizes from time to time, though in the game it only kicks in during extreme emergencies and it's the only way to save his life. And now in Super Mario Galaxy 2, it repeats. Bowser is now really huge (he's big enough to stomp all over Toad Town, and for Peach to fit in the palm of his hand) and he's shown sitting on a castle as a throne. But in this case it's justified as coming from the power of the Grand Stars; whenever Mario beats one out of him he shrinks to normal size. And the Sun appearing at the end of the final level of the first Galaxy. When Mario arrives there, it's huge and full of holes, and his final battle with Bowser even takes place inside that Sun, but when Bowser is defeated, he is seen standing onthe Sun's surface, except that the Sun is now smaller and no longer hollow!

And the castle at the end of World 4 in the original Super Mario Bros. When Mario beats World 4-3, the castle is huge, but at the start of World 5, the castle is tiny!

King Boo. In Luigi's Mansion, he's the size of a normal Boo. In later games, his size varies between being a bit bigger than Mario/Luigi (aka small enough to drive a go-kart and play sports) and absolutely massive. In Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, he is shown to be capable of sizeshifting.

Rosalina in Super Mario Galaxy is shown to be at least as tall as Peach's normal tall size. In the game's ending, Rosalina is shown to be a giant because she's almost like a god. In the spin off games like Mario Kart Wii, Rosalina is still slightly taller than Peach, but is around the same general size of the whole cast to keep things consistent. Rosalina appears to be much smaller when she became a playable character in Super Mario 3D World, being the same height as Peach in that game.

In the overworld scenes for Mario & Luigi: Dream Team, the Zeekeeper is shown to only be about twice as big as the main characters, with his height likely being about 12 foot or so. In his boss battle? He's big enough to go toe to toe with Giant Luigi, who's about the size of a skyscraper. Might be justified by him being an actual deity in the story.

To anybody who has ever played the game, what they do with the heights of bosses (especially at later levels) seems somewhat ridiculous. Just look at the fight with Illidan in the Black Temple. Akama and Maiev are also just as big as he is — which is considerably larger than the average player. Same thing goes for Kael'thas, Lady Vashj, and pretty much every other major end boss whose larger size isn't explained by ties to the Old Gods or the Lich King.

Many faction leaders have their heights dramatically increased when they appear in raids, sometimes up to three times their normal height. The most frequently cited example is Tirion Fordring who is usually the same height as other humans, but in raids can stand up to three times that height.

This is usually handwaved as a game mechanic. Important characters intended to be fought by players are usually scaled to make them easier to find and target without visual obstruction: 5-man bosses may be slightly bigger than normal trash mobs, while 25-party bosses are very large. Even the game's pvp-able racial leaders are slightly bigger than their generic counterparts. When you've got 25-40 people all trying to fight something, making it the same size as the people involved is just going to lead to pain. Regular mooks do much the same thing, though; ogres in the starting areas are the same size or slightly smaller than the player characters; ones in later levels tower over the players.

Malfurion Stormrage appears twice as tall as his wife, Tyrande Whisperwind, in Cataclysm.

While player characters are always the same size as other players of the same race/gender combo, the pets of hunter players grow as they gain levels. Additionally, some large pets like Devilsaurs, which are essentially tyrannosaurs and taller than many buildings, will shrink to a more manageable "slightly bigger than the largest playable races" size when tamed.

This trope is particularly ridiculous in the case of the Caverns of Time raid, The Battle of Mt. Hyjal. You start off with Jaina Proudmoore helping you out. She's a normal-sized NPC you can encounter several times throughout the game. But in this raid? She's around 20 feet tall. For no reason. Thrall is similarly embiggened.

Bridging points both made above and below in the Warcraft III example, player size can also vary with various spells and items. Highlighting the Power = Size formula, we currently have this endgame weapon, which can allow players to practically reach raid boss size after gaining several stacks of the effect.

The Siege of Orgrimmar has a very visible example after the final boss. Garrosh and Thrall appear three times their usual height during the battle, but in the following cinematic and after-battle scene are their normal height again.

This shows up in Warcraft III as well, with Heroes being arbitrarily larger than normal units (seriously, compare the Paladin to the Peasant; ho-lee shit). There's pretty good odds that it's something to do with the Warcraft Universe itself; wherein size is actually a good indicator of power, and as characters become more powerful they actually grow bigger.

A subversion of the usual: Jocinda Smith from Backyard Sports is supposed to be rather short. When you actually play as her, she's one of the tallest on the field.

Metroid: Fusion and Metroid Prime make him even larger than before, but now have explanations for it. In Metroid Prime 3, his largest appearance yet, depicts him as a total gargantuan monster that's large enough to have Samus fit in his mouth. When he reappears later on at the Pirate Homeworld, suddenly he shrinks back to his size as Meta Ridley in the first Metroid Prime game!

Metroid: Other M is an interesting case. During the fight with him at the Geothermal Power Plant, he's large enough to hold Samus in one hand, but that's mostly because not only are his hands huge, but because he's now depicted as being a lot bulkier than before. He's still big, though. They actually had to create a new, larger model for him whenever he tried to grind Samus against the wall.

This also applies to Super Smash Bros. In the introduction FMV to Melee, he was only slightly larger than Samus, comparable to his appearance in Super Metroid. In Brawl he's about twice her size. When he reappears as Meta-Ridley, he's suddenly smaller than he was before, although still larger than the player character him/herself.

Kraid, one of the Space Pirate generals, has this even worse. In his first appearance, he was the size of Samus. In Super Metroid, he was the size of the screen and then some. As with Ridley above, Zero Mission cements his canon size to be the same as Super Metroid.

In the Katamari Damacy series, every member of the royal family varies in size from level to level. The cousins are the most obvious, as they can go from being a few centimeters tall to a kilometer in height to better suit the scale of the level they're in. The King of All Cosmos himself can either stand on the Earth and tower at about 3000 kilometers, or he can be several orders of magnitude larger than the Earth itself.

Much like the anime, the Digimon games often do this, but at least once they manage to do it within the same game. As an example, Beelzemon and Gallantmon are both roughly the same size (around six foot or 1.8 m, based on the buildings) in the opening cutscene of Digimon World 3.

In Halo 4, the Master Chief's size varies in cutscenes. In cutscenes rendered by the game's engine, he looks to be about seven feet (213 cm) tall (his canonical height in armor is 7'2" or 219 cm). In cutscenes rendered by Blur, he's even larger in comparison to the other characters; Commander Palmer (at 6'9" or 206 cm) doesn't even come up to his shoulder, and he absolutely dwarfs unaugmented human characters.

King K. Rool in the Donkey Kong Country series started off as being huge and was pretty much twice as tall and wide as Donkey Kong. When he appeared again in Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest, his size was redone so he was at least tall or slightly taller than Donkey Kong while still being very bulky. The new size became K. Rool's standard appearance in all future incarnations.

Before you free him, K. Lumsy, a giant reptile in Donkey Kong 64, is held in a cage in a room on an island. The cage is not exactly spacious, but it's not a tight fit, either. Once you do free him, he looks like he should be too large for the island, never mind the cage.

The island itself is Bigger on the Inside. How K. Lumsy was able to get inside the island in the first place (and later leave it) only brings up further questions.

Robo Manus from Battletoads was at least twice as tall as the 'Toads in the NES game and the Double Dragon crossover, but the Game Boy game made him a bit taller. This was taken to extremes in the arcade game where he is listed as being over 76 feet tall.

In Mega Man 8, Frost Man was one of the largest Robot Masters in the series and towered over Mega Man. When he appeared in Mega Man 10, he's no longer the behemoth he once was but is still one of the largest Robot Masters. The change in size was because 8 uses 32-bit graphics to show the characters with moderately proportioned sizes, while 10 intentionally reverted back to the classic 8-bit graphics used throughout most of the series that forced characters to all match in size. Mega Man: The Power Battle and Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters use a similar effect with many of their returning Robot Masters, notably Guts Man, Stone Man and Centaur Man.

The Mass Effect games had a strange case of this. While most of the characters were all different sizes in cutscenes, everyone is the same size in actual gameplay. Word of God is that it was due to the technical limitations of the Unreal 3 engine. Apparently they had problems where larger races, like the krogan, salarians , and the turians would get stuck in the terrain, so they just decided to make everyone the same size.

Also, while it's not exactly a character, both versions of the Normandy change size quite a bit throughout the series. One of the more notable examples is during the end of the second game, when Joker brings the Normandy in to extract the squad off of the exploding Collector Base after killing the Human Reaper larvae. Normally the forward section of the Normandy looks to be about 25 feet tall, give or take. In this case, it doesn't appear to be much taller then Joker, who's standing by the door for scale during most of the cutscene.

In Wario Land 3, Rudy the Clown is absolutely massive, standing about five times Wario's height and being big enough to be a Background Boss in a 2D platformer. In Dr Mario 64? He's suddenly roughly human sized.

Sonic the Hedgehog (2006): In-game, even the children of Soleanna are visibly taller than Sonic, but in cutscenes, he stands only slightly shorter than Princess Elise, who herself seems of average height for a young lady her age.

Dragon Age: Origins: Shale was originally planned to be as big as the various NPC golems encountered throughout the story, but had to be shrunk down considerably due to problems with having a playable character that large (notably, she couldn't fit through doors). However, a few cutscenes rendered before the change was made still show her at her original size. For example, the scene where she's first awakened has a shot where she towers over the rest of your party at nearly twice their height before reverting to her normal One Head Taller appearance when the dialogue begins.

Pirate 101: Most of the larger companions will appear only slightly larger than the player when not in combat.

Rayman 2: Razorbeard's giant robot, Grolgoth, is at first shown to be at least 10 times larger than Rayman, and big enough for Razorbeard to be able to fit inside a small cockpit on Grolgoth's belly. But in a later stage of the boss fight, Grolgoth is inexplicably only about 3 times the size of Rayman, and the said cockpit seems smaller than Rayman's torso.

In Kirby: Planet Robobot, the Access Ark mothership used by the Haltmann Works Company is very much subject to this, looking to be almost as big as Popstar itself in the opening cutscene, but when you actually enter it in the last level, it's only a fraction of that size.

Star Dream is also subject to this. When it's first seen, it's about ten times taller then Kirby. Come the final battle, it's now more then twice the size of the Halberd. Lastly, when Kirby goes in for the finishing blow on it, it's shrunk to be only slightly larger then the Invader Armor the pink puffball is piloting.

Grover is a large treant from SMITE and Paladins. In SMITE, he was the mount of Sylvanus and was as big as the other large gods (being several times bigger than a human) to compensate for his rider's small size. In Paladins, Grover's gone solo and while he is one of the larger champions in the game, he is much smaller than he originally was (about a few heads taller than a human).

Web Comics

MegaTokyo: The size of rent-a-zilla is awfully inconsistent. Here, it's around twice the size of Yuki, here it's about the size of a four-story building, while here Yuki seems to be about the size of rent-a-zilla's eye...

In a week of strips from Narbonic, the author's commentary points out that she couldn't keep the giant robot's size consistent from one day to the next.

Notable examples from Generation 1 include a motorcycle transformer becoming as large as a helicopter when forming the leg of a Humongous Mecha, and one about the size of Optimus Prime being able to accommodate a Formula One racer on each of his legs. Robots that transformed into transformer-scale cities were often shown to be no larger than the rest of their fellows who were supposed to be able to fit comfortably inside them. In "Carnage in C-Minor," Scrapper and Hook become small enough for Ultra Magnus to pick one up in each hand and bash their heads together. The list goes on.

In the G1 movie, Unicron and everyone around him vary in size according to the needs of the scene.

Astrotrain deserves special mention. He transforms from a 21 m (70') locomotive (shown to be normal sized compared to others) to a 56 m (184') shuttle (assuming a real life shuttle) — or into an even bigger shuttle, as witnessed by his ability to carry an entire Decepticon team inside of him — including Devastator. And yet Astrotrain's robot mode is as tall as Megatron.

Broadside, another Triple Changer, makes things even stranger. His alt-modes are a moderately large space jet and an entire aircraft carrier, which is probably the single biggest scale disparity in G1. Broadside's robot mode is even more confusing; depending on the time of day, he can be anywhere from as tall as Springer (like his toy) to as tall as Ultra Magnus (which is easy to fit into shots) to as tall as Devastator (which is mostly a concession to "hey, this dude is a giant boat, maybe make him bigger than the dude who's basically three cars stacked together."

To make a long story short-ish: Transformers tend to be just the size the plot needs them to be, and the sizes of robot modes in relation to vehicle modes don't always add up, with small cars and jumbo jets turning into robots of the same height in the original series. Any robot whose purpose isn't to carry others (and some who are, in the case of Astrotrain) will be this standard size. As for the carrier robots, they're often bigger, but not big enough to account for their great interior space... which is also subject to change based on who's inside. The planet-sized Transformers the same problem of being inconsistent or huge-but-not-huge-enough: standard Transformers look like ants at a distance that should render them invisible, unless Megatron's the size of Rhode Island. Later series at least try when it comes to scale — notice Transformers Animated Starscream towering over everyone but Megatron (and the Decepticons in general are bigger because they transform into aircraft instead of cars), and movie Starscream being almost triangle-shaped so he won't — but still have problems.

Also, there's the matter of specific parts of a bot while transforming. The half of Bumblebee's car mode that becomes his feet shrinks as the rest of him seems to grow out of it, so he won't be as Chibi as the keychain-sized toy he's inspired by. Other times, the feet remain the size of the car-half they're formed from as the rest of him just grows and grows and grows out of it.

There are worse cases. Omega Supreme has a sort of dual-vehicle mode, as a train (with track) that's much smaller than the rocket that's composed of just his forearms. When the rocket takes off, the train and track disappears, to reappear when he lands.

True to form, Transformers Prime features this as well. It's like they aren't even trying to hide this, as Arcee transforms into a standard motorcycle and yet fills up Jack's garage in robot mode. Just look at her!◊ Especially amusing given Transformers Energon, where Arcee (a human-scaled motorcycle in this series as well) was frequently alongside its main human sidekick, and was barely a couple heads taller than he.

The fact that Megatron, Soundwave, and the cassettes change size drastically when they transform indicates that Transformers obviously have some sort of technology to change mass and volume. Therefore it's reasonable to assume that they all possess this ability to one degree or another. Still doesn't explain the characters who are smaller than they should be, like the Seekers.

This image◊ does a pretty good job of showing the problem. Of note is the largest character seen: Scout-class Depthcharge, whose toy comes up to Bumblebee's waist, transforms into a seventy-meter corvette boat. A scale-accurate robot mode would be about the size of Mechagodzilla.

A lot of the scale issues from Transformers comes from the simple fact that it's unapologetically Merchandise-Driven, and keeping to a precise scale would seriously limit the kind of vehicles that could be turned into toys. If the car toys were six inches long, for instance, then the only other cost-effective toys would be of three-inch motorbikes, eight-inch truck cabs or armored vehicles, and maybe eleven-inch tanks, and any fighter jet toys would come out being about two feet long and likely cost hundreds of dollars (to say nothing of helicopters, boats, trains, construction vehicles, larger planes, space shuttles...). The Alternators and Human Alliance lines, which completely averted this trope in favor of sticking to a strict 1/24 scale, ran into exactly this problem, as the only modes to easily fit into that scale were cars and smaller trucks. Because of this, the toyline tends to make most of the cast about the same size (though characters with large altmodes tend to be slightly bigger), and the fiction tends to follow suit... which results in the above.

Disregarding the altmode issues, most series have more conventional issues with giants. For instance, in the original cartoon, Optimus is usually shown in scale charts and the like to be around six meters tall, which is actually fairly accurate to his altmode. However, he also routinely becomes big enough to catch a human in the palm of his hand or small enough to fit inside a building.

The short Jack Wabbit and the Beanstalk has Bugs Bunny deal with a giant that varies in scale from scene to scene. In one scene, his head is slightly bigger than Bugs, but later Bugs is able to enter the giant's ear and gets lost in his hair. Most egregious of all is the scene near the end when Bugs goes down an elevator built into the beanstalk and tells the giant to take the stairs. For this one scene the giant has somehow shrunk down to be only about two or three times as tall as Bugs!

Also in Hot Cross Bunny the head scientist's height varies throughout the short; sometimes he's like two feet taller than Bugs and other times he's a foot shorter than him.

In Bugsy and Mugsy, Bugs creates a hole in the floor of a condemned apartment. He's his usual size when outside the hole, but inside he's around the size of a mouse, which is especially noticeable when he's carrying a a magnet almost as big as him.

Gantu from the Lilo & Stitch franchise varies in size too, especially in The Series. One scene he towers over Lilo's house, the next he could conceivably fit inside it.

In the episode "Planet Jackers" in Invader Zim, Zim and the jackers look enormous in relation to Earth, and IIRC we could see the curvature of the planet from their perspective while Zim was getting crushed on it. Not as extreme as some other examples, but still....

The DuckTales episode "Ducky Horror Picture Show" featured a big ape named Ping Pong. When he first comes in right before the second commercial break, he's about as tall as Scrooge's Money Bin. But right after the ad break, he suddenly gets smaller than the Bin so that he can climb it and relax on the roof.

Phineas is usually shorter than Isabella, but sometimes he's the same height or taller.

In the episode "Attack of the Fifty Foot Sister", gigantic-Candace climbs Doofenshmirtz's building King Kong-style, meaning it is several times taller than her. In the episode "The Lizard Whisperer" Steve is able to easily reach the roof of the same building despite supposedly being forty feet.

Lisa: 'Scuse me, Paul Bunyan never fought Rodan. And his size seems to be really inconsistent. I mean, one minute he's 10 feet tall, the next his foot is as big as a lake.

Happens to the Loch Ness Monster in the episode "Monty Can't Buy Me Love". Compare its size here◊ to this later scene◊.

Scooby-Doo could be terrible with this some times. For example, one episode's monster of the week was a panther-headed giant taller than most trees. Yet, after they'd managed to knock him down, Freddy walked up to him and unmasked the (now human-sized with no explanation whatsoever) monster. Another egregious example came in an episode where they were facing down a monster called the Snow Beast, which was essentially a large, furry tyrannosaurus (or at least what the general public thought a tyrannosaurus looked like in the 70s). In most outdoor scenes, it was positively massive, at least 50 feet tall. But it also appeared in one scene indoors, in a hall that couldn't have been more that 12 feet tall, and it's head didn't even brush the roof!

The animators can't decide how big Big Macintosh is. In some cases he's One Head Taller than the other ponies; in others he's only got a few inches over a typical adult mare. Observe this photoset.

Since turning into an alicorn, Twilight Sparkle is depicted as slightly taller than the other ponies, though it can vary anywhere between looking only slightly more upright, to coming off as incredibly lanky next to them. Lampshaded in one episode where she takes offence to a incredibly gangly doodle of her by Rainbow Dash.

Dragon Lord Torch, one of the largest characters to appear in the show, initially appears to be quite colossal; the rest of the dragons, themselves generally taller than the average pony, barely take up space in the palm of his hand and are slightly smaller than one of his eyeballs. However, in one scene in the same episode he debuts in, he's shrunken down to a degree that the other dragons are about as tall as his snout, and in a cameo in a later episode he's shrunken further so that his head is the size of one of the smaller dragons.

Mr. Gus in Uncle Grandpa alternates between being about a head taller than Uncle Grandpa and being massive enough to pass for Godzilla.

The creators of Steven Universe have acknowledged several times that they don't use a scale chart. The only rule they follow is a size order for characters on-screen at the same time (i.e. x is bigger than y, y is bigger than z, etc.); how big the size differences are varies based on the needs of the scene. Lapis, for instance, is taller than Amethyst and shorter than Pearl, which means she can go from barely above eye-level with Steven◊ to almost twice his height. Jasper is big, but can be anywhere from a head taller than Garnet in one shot to one of her arms outmassing Garnet's entire body in another◊. And this isn't even getting into the titanic Fusion Gems and Diamonds: Sugilite's second appearance practically doubled her size for dramatic impact, and Sardonyx starts off being four or five times Steven's height before being large enough to hold him in the palm of her hand. In Yellow Diamond's first appearance, her Pearl comes to around the height of her knee◊, while by her second appearance she's large enough for two Pearls to comfortably rest in the palm of her hand◊.

Toot Braunstein from Drawn Together alternates between being only slightly overweight and being fat enough to beach herself.

Small Characters

Advertising

In the 2008 commercial of Orangina, you have chameleon strip dancers who are as big as the rest of the cast. But then at the 1:16 mark, you see a chameleon dancing to one of the plant people... who are small.

Anime and Manga

In Pokémon Special, in one panel Black's Munna looks a lot bigger than it previously did. This is worth pointing out because his Munna bellyflopped on his head and looked like it should've sent him toppling over. Fans joked that constantly feeding off Black's dreams made it fat.

The main character of Ginga Densetsu Weed, Weed, varies in size from scene to scene. He's a puppy, so he's smaller than the rest of the dogs, but how small depends on the scene.

Luffy of One Piece has always been pint-sized compared to his opponents, but in the start of the series, he seemed to be of average height compared to most background characters and civilians in the story. Except for a few serious moments where is drawn more mature-looking, he is now One Piece's size equivalent of Kid Goku.

Nami is even shorter than Luffy, which is saying a lot in this series. Despite this, she is usually drawn with very long legs and an oblong, slim body so that she looks like a Statuesque Stunner. In some panels, she is correctly drawn shorter than Luffy, Zoro, Usopp, and Sanji (or same height/slightly taller if she is wearing heels), but in other panels she seems to tower over them and is almost the same height as Robin.

In Magical Nyan Nyan Taruto, the height of the anthropomorphic cats varies between scenes, with scenes depicting just those characters generally depicting them as roughly one or two feet (30-60 cm) tall, while scenes in which they interact with human characters frequently give them apparent heights of up to a meter.

Suzu of Seitokai Yakuindomo. Her shortness tends to change depending on how much exaggeration of it is needed for a given gag. For comparison, her height generally seems to be between crotch to lower chest on Takatoshi.

The Kuribohs in Yu-Gi-Oh! vary from the size of a softball to the size of a beachball. Winged Kuriboh, with its large number of appearances, was a particular offender.

And Yugi himself seems to vary in size a lot. Apart from the fact Yami Yugi is often taller for no good reason, Yugi sometimes looks just unreasonably tiny◊ depending on the scene.

In A Certain Magical Index, Kuroko was the same height as Mikoto in a few scenes of the Hyouka Kazakiri arc, when Kuroko is normally a head shorter than her.

Krillin from the Dragon Ball series is the shortest adult character but how short he is varies, most of the time he reaches the taller characters shoulders like his wife Android 18, but in a group shot in Dragon Ball Super he is shown to reach up to her stomach.

In Gourmet Girl Graffiti, Ryou and Kirin's relative size tends to vary from scene to scene. Sometimes Kirin, the shorter of the two, is barely up to Ryou's chest, and other times she's all the way up to her chin.

Comic Books

Marvel's Official Handbooks are a handy reference point for every fanboy who wants something to argue over. By way of an example, Wolverine has been consistently listed as 5'3" (160 cm), and Jubilee an inch or two (2.5-5 cm) taller. Despite this Wolverine tends to tower over Jubilee, to the point where she must be about 4'6" (137 cm). When they stand next to other characters, their height tends to appear more as listed.

The Silver Age bottled city of Kandor was blatantly subject to this. It was a shrunken city where the buildings were visibly several inches tall. That scale would mean the city would only be a block or so in size, yet the people in it were microscopic and the city was a whole city of millions of inhabitants. The inhabitants themselves suffered this, too; when outside the bottle they could go from microscopic (to the point where Superman needed his telescopic vision to see them) to an inch tall.

Doll Man's shrinking ability is supposed to be limited to switching between his normal height and 6 inches (15 cm) tall, but he has been portrayed anywhere from a few inches to a couple of feet tall, often varying in size within a single story. One comic cover shows him large enough to be tied to separate bathtub faucet knobs, while another cover has him smaller than a handgun.

In Welcome to the Jungle, Will's height can vary from coming up to Dresden's nose (Since Dresden is canonically 6'9", that would make her around 6'4") to coming up to Dresden's shoulder (Making her around 5'10") - over the course of two pages.

Comic Strips

The cast of Peanuts have legs that seemingly telescope to twice their normal size whenever they have to crouch or kneel, because Schulz had to make room for the knees. Usually the legs are barely one quarter of their height.

Films — Animation

In Pinocchio, Jiminy Cricket goes inside a lock to pick it. The lock seems to be no deeper than Jiminy is tall, and yet the scenes from inside the lock make it seem cavernous. Also, Jiminy is significantly larger in long shots simply because he'd be invisible otherwise.

In Madagascar II, the penguins' size changes a couple of times throughout the movie. Usually they are a couple inches shorter than the monkeys, but in one scene Skipper is small enough to to fit in Mason the monkey's hand.

Warren T. Rat, Big Bad of the film An American Tail, at one point is dwarfed by the fat rat at the sweatshop, and later, is shown the same size as the rest of the cats in his gang. It seems his size varies depending on whether or not he's in his rat costume.

In Jungledyret Hugo the titular Hugo is about the size of a small cat, his size tends to vary throughout the first movie, in one scene he is small enough to fit inside a dollhouse, sleep in the bed, and climb down the little stairs.

Foreign translations of The Hobbit simply cannot agree on Gollum's size. Sometimes they keep him about the same size as Bilbo, sometimes (such as in the Japanese translation), he's enormous, much larger even than a human.

The Moomins and other characters in the original books don't seem too concerned with maintaining the same size, though you may miss it if you don't pay attention. Sometimes they seem to be much smaller than you'd think from visual adaptations, where they've been kind of standardised. An obvious example is when they trap the ant lion in Finn Family Moomintroll; it's dangerous and could eat them, and an illustration shows its head being bigger than Moomintroll, but right after that, they capture it in a jar.

Roland Rat: Living Legend seems to have its rodent characters the size of actual rats (Roland's grandfather can sit on Anton de Farcey's shoulder; the "rodent maternity ward" of the hospital is a broom cupboard, with dusters for beds), except when it occasionally remembers that in the TV shows, the puppets are about four feet tall.

Live-Action TV

Little Britain plays this for laughs in the Dennis Waterman sketches. He appears to get smaller as he is the size of a small child in the first series, then an action figure by the second.

Video Games

Kirby is officially 20 centimeters (8 inches) tall, but appears about 3 feet tall in Super Smash Bros. compared to other characters, and King Dedede is only about twice his height despite being a heavyweight in Smash. Even more egregious with Olimar, who is about and inch and a half tall in his native Pikmin series and yet is just barely smaller than most other characters in the roster.

The height lines in Criminal Case apparently isn't fixed, so the suspects' heights (assuming they appear more than once) tends to vary from case to case. A notable example is Adam Bently, who is officially stated to be 5'10" tall, but sometimes appear as 5'8" or just a bit over 6' in the suspect lineups.

In the main campaign of Shovel Knight, Plague Knight stands as tall as King Knight, being about twice the height of Shovel Knight. In the Plague of Shadows expansion, Plague Knight becomes the same height as Shovel Knight. This becomes especially noticable when You fight the original Plague Knight boss battle at the end of his campaign. It should be noted that if you bomb your way into Plague Knight's secret room in the Explodatorium, you'll find his mask closet. Inside, the larger, more hooked mask he wears as a boss sits alongside a bunch of the smaller masks he wears as a playable character. This implies he uses some form of trickery to seem larger when you play as Shovel Knight.

Most of the characters in Crash Bandicoot suffer from this due to ever changing designs and character models.

Dr Neo Cortex is generally depicted as vertically challenged though this can range from merely being below average height but exaggerated by his huge forehead, to being outright puny. Compare scenes of him next to Crash in Twinsanity to those in Tag Team Racing.

Coco can either be Crash's Big Little Sister or a teeny little girl almost half his size.

In Crunch's debut The Wrath of Cortex, he was depicted as gargantuan and almost three times Crash size, by far the largest of Cortex's creations. In most games after he's only a couple of heads taller than Crash and dwarfed by Cortex's previous powerhouses such as Tiny.

Noel's breasts are several times stated to be very flat. Flat as a board or to the point that they don't exist. However, her sprites and many of her artworks depict her breasts as much bigger than A-Cup.

Jubei is officially 123cm tall, but when he finally became playable, he's deliberately given a larger sprite to not make him a Game-Breaker.

Visual Novels

In Hatoful Boyfriend, the size of the birds is all over the place. The parakeets in the bird cafe look normal-sized, but a Chukar Partridge is able to overpower the human heroine, three pigeons are able to physically intimidate her, and a finch is able to give the heroine a ride on a scooter. A rock dove is also able to drag the heroine along, but at the same time her human physical strength is prized by the other birds (which she can grab and throw out of the window as punishment) and she has an outrageously high Vitality stat. There is also a scene where Hiyoko thinks the defeathered corpse of a dove is "either a chicken or a turkey", implying it's somewhere between those two sizes. A scene in Bad Boy's Love featuring an office, then an inserted close-up of a pigeon silhouetted at the desk, can be extrapolated to a guess that turkey size seems about right.

Plankton tends to vary in size even within the same scene. Generally, he is anywhere from the size of a golf ball and small enough that a microscope is required to see him.

The size of Bikini Bottom and its citizens also tend to change from episode to episode in comparison to the environmental surroundings. It's easy to understand that sometimes the characters are depicted as human-sized living in a city underwater, and other times they're smaller than David Hasselhoff's foot.

Kidvs Kat: Coop Burtonburger has shown to be the same height as his father's head to him being the same almost the same height as him.

Kim Possible: Ron Stoppable's Non-Human Sidekick, Rufus, usually rests comfortably in Ron's pocket. When other characters aren't around for comparison, though, Rufus tends to be somewhat larger in comparison to furniture and other objects, about the size of a small cat.

Timmy Turner isn't particularly small, but still falls victim to this trope from time to time. Regular-sized adults frequently clench him in a single hand, and one scene in an early episode actually shows Timmy standing in his dad's hands, no larger than a basketball, in Season 9 he goes to up his parents waists if not a bit higher such as shown in Dumbbell Curve and Country Clubbed for example.

TrixieTang's height relative to Timmy tends to be quite inconsistent. Most of the time she'll be depicted as about a head taller than Timmy, but it has ranged anywhere from Trixie only being a little taller than him to her being at least twice as tall as him.

Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers characters are sometimes subject to this, even when Nimnul's ray gun isn't involved. Especially see Queenie from "Risky Beesness": her size relative to the Rangers changes for no apparent reason over the course of an episode.

Woody Woodpecker: Woody stands two or three feet (60-90 cm) high most of the time, yet there are times where he seems to be much smaller. In one cartoon, for example, he is able to fit through the finger holes of a bowling ball.

Bobby Hill's height varies from episode to episode especially in the later episodes, in some episodes he reaches Hank's shoulder and in others he barely reaches his stomach.

Cotton's height fluctuates depending on whether nor not the animators remember why he's so short. When drawn correctly he is proportioned like an adult so when he sits down he is as large as Hank. When drawn incorrectly he's drawn to be the same size as Bobby even though he stood 6'4" prior to having his shins shot off.

Dexter's Laboratory. Dexter is usually shown to be probably half as tall as DeeDee and around knee high to his parents, but sometimes he seems much smaller (though sometimes this is clearly intentionally done to play on his insecurities about his height).

In Ben 10: Ultimate Alien, Nanomech looks about 3 or 4 inches in most shots (a little smaller than Greymatter), but Kevin was able to shoot him out of a regular drinking straw, which would make him less than 1/4 of an inch tall. This is justified however, as the Alien Swarm movie that introduced Nanomech states that one of his powers is the ability to shrink to unknown levels (At least small enough to fly inside a human brain without injuring it).

Noah's height varies from scene to scene and season to season. He's the third shortest male contestant in Island, but in World Tour he's around the same height as Tyler, who's supposed to be fairly tall.

Cody is supposed to be extremely short and slight, but his slouch and cartoonish proportions often make his actual height unclear. The inconsistency is especially apparent when he stands next to Gwen; sometimes he's slightly taller than her while other times the top of his head barely reaches her nose.

Sierra is the tallest girl by a wide margin and the third-tallest World Tour cast member, but her height isn't entirely consistent. In the most notable case of this, she was standing next to Duncan, who's on the upper end of average and about level with her chin, and in the VERY NEXT SHOT he was nearly as tall as she was.

Eddy of Ed, Edd n Eddy is the shortest of the older kids, but how short tends to vary. Usually, he is about up to Edd's chin and up to Ed's chest in height, but one episode depicts him as a being shorter than even Sarah and Jimmy, the youngest of the characters. However, that particular episode was about how he hates that he is short and longs to be taller, so it may have been done for that reason.

Danger Mouse and Penfold would occasionally be the size of humans whenever the animators forgot they're supposed to be tiny.

While not strictly a character, NICOLE of the Sonic SatAM cartoon would vary from the size of a pocket calculator to the size of a textbook between appearances.

Though they're all highly anthropomorphised, the mice in Cat City are normally of realistic size compared to the cats. However the rats who appear with them both side-by-side in different scenes mess up the whole thing. They seem to be just a little bit shorter than the cats, yet at the same time aren't that much taller than the mice. Most jarring of all, Grabowski (a mouse) fits comfortably into a bottle that one of the rats drank empty in one scene, and later stands face to face with him, coming up to the rat's shoulder. Also, a bunch of chickens appear in one shot, and are apparently as small compared to cats as they are to humans in real life.

Hanna-Barbera's 1975 redeux of Tom and Jerry had Jerry (who curiously wears a bow tie) the same size he was in the original theatrical cartoons at the start. As the series went on, he suddenly grew to where his head reached the bottom of Tom's belly.

Looney Tunes: Speedy Gonzales is normally the size of a regular mouse, but in Daffy Duck's Movie: Fantastic Island he goes up to Daffy's waist.

Adventure Time has Me-Mow whose size varies trough her starring chapter, at first she is shown to be as big as Jake's head, then she spends half the chapter inside Jake's nose taking him hostage, at the end of the episode when Finn grabs her, she is two times as big as Finn's hand.

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